India is a police state but why is police or policing not an election issue anywhere ?

A former Jharkhand minister who resigned from BJP after he was denied ticket to contest the last Assembly election, recently asked several questions on social media. Did the Special Branch of Jharkhand Police set up a cell in 2018 for illegal phone tapping, asked Sarayu Roy, an MLA.

Was this cell run by an unauthorized non-policeman Baijnath Prasad? Was he given eight computers, eight technicians, vehicle, driver and bodyguard and the services of three DSPs -- Deepak Sharma, K.K. Mahto and Anil Singh, Roy went on to ask.

The questions did not cause any ripple, possibly because people now expect the state to engage in both legal and illegal activities. They did not elicit any response either. The forensic report of an American expert that malware were planted in the computer of a Bhima-Koregaon accused to implicate him, again failed to generate any interest.

In the wake of allegations levelled against the former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh, the Mumbai unit of AAP demanded an inquiry against IPS officer Deven Bharati for being allegedly a part of an extortion racket. Around the same time Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik claimed that another IPS officer Rashmi Shukla was tapping the phones of MVA leaders at the behest of BJP.

The BJP government at the Centre initiated a ‘social registry’ in 2015 to track people. A bureaucrat involved in developing the programme , Manoranjan Kumar, last year levelled serious allegations that the programme was intrusive and was liable to be misused.

The social registry, he warned, would automatically track “when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home, and will use Aadhaar numbers to integrate religion, caste, income, property, education, marital status, employment, disability and family-tree data of every single citizen into one giant database.” Once again, the allegations elicited no response from the government and not a squeak was heard against the registry. It is easy to see how the government and the ruling party, if it has access to the data, can use the information.

The Social Registry was intended to automatically track the social and economic lives of citizens — ostensibly in a bid to continuously estimate their eligibility for government assistance. However, as work on the registry progressed, Manoranjan Kumar, then the Economic Advisor to the Ministry of Rural Development, realised that such a system could easily be misused by governments. He also pointed out that the US’s Social Security System worked at this scale because it had “the highest privacy concerns attended efficiently”. No one responded to Kumar’s observations on the file.

“I saw India was emerging as a police state. Strong police state. And my belief is very simple that for any country to develop, it should allow more freedom to the household sector and the businesses and impose less control,” Kumar told Huffington Post.

“Unfortunately, today we have converted all government organisations and semi-government organisations as a policing agent,” he said. “Be it the insurance regulation, banking, taxation, or property registration, everybody sees it from a criminal angle and less freedom is being given to the household and business sector.”

Increasingly evidence has surfaced about the politicization of the police as well. Akhil Gogoi, who is under arrest since December 2019 for his role in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests in Assam, released a letter last month and alleged that NIA officials gave him political lectures.The Raijor Dal president claimed, “First I was told about Hindutva and then offered inducement. I was told that if I joined RSS, I would get bail immediately. When I refused this embarrassing offer, I was given a chance to join BJP. They said I could contest from a vacant assembly seat and become a minister in the BJP government in Assam,” he said. “Because of my refusals, several cases were heaped on me and I even failed to get bail from the Supreme Court. Now it seems all chances of getting out are lost. My family is almost finished, and I am physically destroyed.”

Similar allegations have been levelled against both UP Police and Delhi Police. Arrested farmers, journalists and activists have recounted how they were lectured in custody on the futility of protests and why it was important for them to fall in line.

Meanwhile video clips on social media provide almost daily vivid pictures of police brutality. The manner in which policemen pounce on people not wearing masks is designed to evoke cynicism. The same policemen who look the other way when political leaders and political workers and supporters jostle at rallies without masks, do not think twice before assaulting unarmed citizens. A video from Telangana recently showed police beating up a man because he had stopped his two-wheeler a few meters from where the policemen stood.

There is no evidence to suggest that the lot of the average policeman has improved during the last seven years in terms of wages, housing, social security, working conditions etc. With over 90 percent of the police comprising Head Constables and constables, successive governments have paid only lip service to them. But unable to voice their grievances or form unions, they have been at the receiving end of arbitrary orders. Even the benevolent fund for them comprises largely donations made by themselves or paltry amounts raised by hosting charity shows and police nights. Large number of vacancies, reportedly around 30 percent, and long working hours, denial of leave etc. are some issues which do not seem to have been addressed.

In 2014 as the freshly minted Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, fond of acronyms, had come up with one for the police. Police, he had said, should be SMART; strict and sensitive-modern and mobile-alert and accountable-reliable and responsible and finally techno-savvy and trained. But in the election season, nobody is holding the PM or the CM accountable for police and policing. Isn’t law and order a state subject and are not police under the control of state governments?

(Views are personal)